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Like so many home cooks in quarantine, after I’ve used up the green tops of my scallions, I drop the white, hairy roots into a glass of water to regenerate, feeling pleased with my own sense of thrift and pragmatism.
和许多自己做饭的居家隔离者一样，我把葱的绿叶部分吃完后，会把长着根须的葱白部分放进一杯水里，让葱苗再生——自己能做到这么节俭务实，我颇为得意。
But last week, after the Chinese internet star Li Ziqi posted a new cooking video to YouTube called “The Life of Garlic,” I wished I could graduate from scallions on the windowsill.
但上周，中国网红李子柒在油管上发布了一个名为“蒜的一生”的烹饪视频，看完后，我真希望自己能从窗台种葱这个“初级班”早点儿毕业。
In the 12-minute video, which already has over seven million views, Ms. Li pushes garlic cloves into a patch of earth outside her home. A time lapse shows the sprouts growing, reaching up toward the sky.
在这个时长12分钟、浏览量已超700万次的视频中，李子柒把蒜瓣种在她家外面的一小块地里。随着时间流逝，蒜苗破土而出，伸向天空。
Ms. Li sautées the young, fresh green garlic shoots with pork. When she harvests the bulbs, she plaits the stems, hanging them up to finish the drying process, pickling and preserving the rest, and using some to season chicken feet and dress salad.
李子柒用鲜嫩的青蒜苗炒猪肉。收获蒜头之后，她把茎秆编成绳辫，挂起来完成晾干的一步，剩下的腌渍保存起来，还用了一些给鸡爪和拌菜调味。
Ms. Li, who lives in a village in Sichuan Province and rarely speaks to press, looks not unlike a Disney princess in her crown braids, wearing a silvery fur cape, trudging gracefully in the snow. At 29, she is famous for her mesmerizing videos of rural self-sufficiency, posted on Weibo and YouTube.
李子柒住在四川省的一个小村庄里，极少接受媒体采访。她梳着盘起的麻花辫，像头戴皇冠，身穿银色毛皮斗篷，在雪地里跋涉时步态优雅，看上去简直就是从迪士尼动画里走出的公主。29岁的她因为在微博和油管上发布自给自足乡村生活的迷人视频而出名。
For a worldwide audience in isolation, her D.I.Y. pastoral fantasies have become a reliable source of escape and comfort.
对于世界各地居家隔离的观众来说，她这种凡事亲力亲为的田园牧歌式生活令人向往，已经成为寻求解脱和安慰的可靠来源。
I usually plan to watch one — just one — but then I let the algorithm guide me to another, and another, until, soothed by bird song and instrumentals, I’m convinced that I’m absorbing useful information from Ms. Li about how to live off the land.
按通常的做法，我只打算看一个视频——就看一个——但这次看完一个之后，我忍不住在系统引导下又看了一个，然后看了一个又一个，直到在鸟鸣和乐曲的抚慰下，我确信自己从她那里学到了不少靠土地为生的有用信息。
If I’m ever stuck with two dozen sweet potatoes, I now have some idea how to extract the starch and use it to make noodles. This is what I tell myself. Leave me alone in a lotus pond, and I know how to harvest and prepare the roots.
如果我曾经对两打红薯不知所措，那现在我已经知道如何从中提取淀粉并用淀粉做粉条了。我对自己就是这么说的。就算一个人在荷塘里，我也知道怎么采摘和收拾莲藕了。
Ms. Li doesn’t explain anything as she goes. In fact, she tends to work in silence, without the use of any modern kitchen gadgets. Her sieve is a gourd. Her grater is a piece of metal that she punctures, at an angle, then attaches to two pieces of wood. Her basin is a stream, where she washes the dirt from vegetables.
李子柒在视频里只一味做事，不做任何解释。事实上，她喜欢安静地工作，不使用任何现代厨房设备。她的筛子是葫芦做的。她的刨丝器是一块金属片，自己斜向穿了一些孔，固定在两块木头上。小溪就是她的洗菜盆，她在那里洗去蔬菜上的污垢。
Her kitchen is nothing like mine, in Los Angeles. But watching Ms. Li on my laptop, while eating a bowl of buttered popcorn for dinner, I think maybe I could be happy living like that, too, soaking in the sheer natural beauty of the countryside, devoting myself to extremely traditional ways of cooking.
她的厨房跟我在洛杉矶的厨房完全不一样。但是，一边用笔记本电脑看李子柒，一边捧一碗奶油爆米花吃着当晚餐，我想或许我也可以像她那样快乐地生活，沉浸于乡村纯粹的自然之美，彻底采用极为传统的烹饪方式。
Ms. Li makes peach blossom wine and cherry wine, preserves loquats and rose petals. She makes fresh tofu, and Lanzhou-style noodle soup with a perfectly clear broth, and ferments Sichuan broad bean paste from scratch. She butchers ducks and whole animals.
李子柒酿造桃花酒和樱桃酒，保存枇杷和玫瑰花瓣。她制作新鲜豆腐和汤汁清澈的兰州拉面，还从零开始发酵制作四川豆瓣酱。她宰杀鸭子和整只的动物。
She is not known for taking shortcuts. A video about matsutake mushrooms begins with her building the grill to cook them, laying the bricks down one at a time, scraping the mortar smooth, then hunting for mushrooms in the woods.
急功近利不是她的风格。在关于松茸的视频里，她先搭起烤松茸的烤架，把砖头一块块垒起，刮平灰浆，然后到树林里搜寻蘑菇。
In a video about cooking fish, she first goes fishing, in the snow, patiently throwing back any catches that are too small, as snowflakes freeze into her hair.
在关于焖鱼的视频里，一个雪天，她先去钓鱼，耐心地把太小的鱼扔回水里，雪花落在她的头发上凝结起来。
Like the main character in some kind of post-apocalyptic novel, Ms. Li is almost always alone, though she doesn’t seem lonely, riding her horse through fields of wildflowers, or carrying baskets of sweet potatoes under citrus trees. She seems tireless, focused, confident, independent.
就像某类末世后小说中的主人公一样，李子柒几乎总是一个人，不过她似乎并不孤独，有时骑马穿行野花遍地的田野，有时在橘树下运送一篮蓝红薯。她似乎不知疲倦，专注、自信且独立。
The videos are deeply soothing. But it’s not just that — they reveal the intricacy and intensity of labor that goes into every single component of every single dish, while also making the long, solitary processes of producing food seem meaningful and worthwhile.
这些视频让人深感慰藉。但是不仅如此——它们还揭示了每道菜的每一个组分中倾注的复杂繁重的劳动，同时也让漫长而孤独的烹饪过程显得颇有意义和价值。
It’s the complete opposite of most cooking content, the kind that suggests that everything is so quick and easy that you can do it, too, and probably in less than 30 minutes.
这与大多数烹饪内容完全相反，那暗示着一切都是那么简单快速，你也可以做到，而且可能用不了30分钟。
But Ms. Li also romanticizes the struggles of farm life, and, as any savvy influencer would, monetizes that appeal. In her online shop, she sells a curved cleaver, similar to the ones she uses in her videos, as well as loose Hanfu-inspired linen clothing, Sichuan ginseng honey and chile sauces.
但是李子柒也浪漫化了农村生活的艰苦挣扎，而且，像任何精明的网红一样，她也充分利用这种吸引力，将其变现。她的网店里出售一种弯刀，类似她在视频中使用的那种，还有以汉服为灵感设计的宽松亚麻服装、四川参蜜和辣椒酱。
Ms. Li’s story, as she tells it, is that she left home as a teenager to find work, but returned to the countryside to take care of her grandmother, then began documenting her life. Though she used to shoot her videos alone, on her phone, she now works with an assistant and a videographer.
按照李子柒自己的说法，她的故事是这样的：十几岁时离家外出务工，但后来回到乡村照顾祖母，然后开始记录自己的生活。虽然以前都是一个人用手机拍视频，但现在她有了一个助手和一名摄影师。
“I simply want people in the city to know where their food comes from,” Ms. Li said, in a rare interview with Goldthread last fall. (She never responded to my requests.)
“我只想让在城市里生活的人知道，他们吃的食物是从哪里来的。”去年秋天，李子柒罕见地接受了Goldthread的采访，她当时这么表示。（对于我的采访请求，她一直没有回应。）
But most of the world’s food, whether in China or the United States, doesn’t come from anyone’s backyard, and isn’t made from scratch. Noodles are produced and packaged in factories. Chickens and pigs are gutted on fast, dangerous lines.
但是，不管在中国还是美国，世界上的大部分食物都不是来自任何人的后院，也不是从零开始制作的。面条是在工厂里生产和包装的。鸡和猪在快速、危险的流水线上被宰杀。
The fragility of our industrial supply chains, and the immense risks for the people who work in commercial plants and slaughterhouses, have been laid bare in the last few weeks.
产业供应链的脆弱性以及在商业工厂和屠宰场工作的人们所面临的巨大风险，在过去几周暴露无遗。
Ms. Li sidesteps the existence of that broken system entirely. This is the powerful fantasy of her videos right now — people growing and cooking all of their own food, not wasting anything, and not needing anything more than what they already have around them.
李子柒完全回避了这个残缺体系的存在。这是她的视频当下提供的极具影响力的幻想生活——人们自己种植和烹饪所有所需的食物，除了大自然提供的一切，什么都不需要。
In isolation, watching Ms. Li gather rose petals and ripe tomatoes, I catch myself thinking, is this sequence set in the past, or the future? Are these videos a record of the collective food knowledge we’ve already lost, or an idealized vision of its recovery?
在居家隔离中，看着李子柒采摘玫瑰花瓣和成熟番茄的视频，我不禁思忖，这一切是发生在过去还是未来？这些视频是对我们已经丧失的食物常识的记录，还是对其复兴的理想化愿景？
本文如果对你有帮助，请点赞收藏《李子柒登上《纽约时报》：隔离时期的田园“公主”（中英双语）》，同时在此感谢原作者。
